Each time I knew right away which one I liked more, but I always fumbled for the reasons why.īob smiled and nodded at my discomfort. He did this for maybe four or five sets of paintings. In 1978, after I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to work on my PhD, my advisor, Robert Zajonc, would call me into his office, hold up two museum postcards with modern art paintings on them, then ask me which one I liked better. Why did I like the bands that I did? Why did some songs make the hair on my arms stand up or cause me to involuntarily bounce, while others provoked absolute indifference? Why did music have such a powerful effect on my emotions? It spoke to some hidden reservoir of myself that I didn’t understand, but which clearly existed and was important. In contrast, the reason I was so obsessed with music was that it defied explanation. As “Ramble On” drifted away with Robert Plant’s “Mah baby, mah baby, mah baby” growing softer and softer, I would overlay the thunder and rain that opens the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm.”Īs a midwestern kid who was just beginning to figure out what he wanted to do with his life, I was drawn to psychology because it promised a future of explanations: why humans did what they did, both good and bad what the components of our minds were that determined our thoughts and feelings and, most intriguing of all, how we might use this deepening well of knowledge to reshape ourselves and our world. One of the things I loved most about Led Zeppelin was how the often strange and drawn-out ends to their songs spurred me to be more creative in the transitions I engineered. Like two people meeting in the doorway of a restaurant as one leaves while the other arrives, the two songs overlap for several seconds, and this creates a pleasing sense of continuity. To drop a new song in properly, you have to match its rhythm and even its musical key with those of the song you’re fading out. It’s an art that involves both intuition and expertise, and it took me quite a few on-air mishaps before I finally felt relaxed in my soundproof, windowed box at the station. Spinning records requires more than mere technique, and this was especially true back in the pre-digital, vinyl days. When I wasn’t working at a research lab in the Psychology Department, I spent my time hanging out at the student-run FM radio station, WPGU, where I was the nighttime disc jockey. This was the mid-1970s, and I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. In college, I majored in psychology and minored in Led Zeppelin.
The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
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